Don Jr tests positive, as his father dodges media questions

The Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping?

….That’s what the organisers of petition have called for, following the infamous Trump campaign press conference on 7 November in which Rudy Giuliani reacted to media outlets calling the election for Joe Biden in real time, from the car park of a gardening company.

More than 2,800 people have signed the petition at change.org to recognise the bizarre role the business played in the 2020 election, with calls for it to be named to the National Register of Historic Places.

“We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper,” states the petition.

The confirmed US death toll from coronavirus has surpassed 250,000, and still remains the highest figure of any country in the world, according to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University on Wednesday. 

It comes as infections, hospitalisations and mortality rates rapidly increase in a swathe of American states, while the number of people hospitalised with the virus has rise to at least 78,630 - the highest ever for a single day during the pandemic.

The US president, Donald Trump, has meanwhile continued to remain silent on the crisis since the election, which he lost. 

Danielle Zoellner has the latest: 

In an apparent reference to remarks made by Donald Trump last month, the United States top infectious diseases expert and adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has said that the current spike in Covid-19 cases evidenced that it “doesn’t even come close in flu”. 

“For those who say, ‘This is like the flu. We have flu every single year,’ I have never seen a situation where you have a quarter of a million deaths, 11 million infections, hospitalisations where you have 70K people in the hospital," added Dr Fauci. 

President Donald Trump, in comparison, claimed as recently as last month that the coronavirus was something “we have learned to live with it,” and was less severe than seasonal flu - in direct contradiction of health experts and his own private admission to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in February, which was leaked several months ago. 

Donald Trump’s maligned attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win are shifting toward’s the certification of results in battleground states won by the Democrat, as his campaign’s legal challenges largely fall-apart in court.

The president’s allies in Michigan initially refused to approve results in the state, despite no evidence of election fraud., while in Arizona, officials are reportedly retreating from signing off on results in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, under pressure from the state’s Republican party. 

Similar efforts to stop the certification of results in Nevada have also been made. 

Why?

Some of the president’s closest aides have suggested that by delaying certification of results in certain states, Republican-controlled state legislatures would then be able to select electors that could either overturn Mr Biden’s victory or send the presidential election to the Congress, where Mr Trump would almost surely win.

Here’s all you need to know:

Donald Trump has reportedly made no plans to host a G7 summit that was due to take place this year, three diplomatic sources said on Wednesday, following an earlier cancellation in June because of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Speaking about the summit in August, the president said he was “much more inclined to do it sometime after the election. ... We could do it through teleconference or we could do it through a meeting". 

But time is now running out to plan the meeting of the world’s seven major economies before he hands over power on 20 January to Joe Biden,  said one of the diplomatic sources and a fourth source familiar with the matter.

Mr Trump had suggested he was considering  extended an invitation to Russian president Vladimir Putin to attend the summit, after the country was expelled from the group in 2014 for its annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.

Mr Putin is among a number of world leaders who have delayed acknowledging Mr Biden as the winner of the US election. 

Reuters

A Florida politics professor and head of the US Elections Project, Michael McDonald, has provided the US president with a neat debunk of his accusations about Wisconsin’s election process on Wednesday night.

Mr Trump wrote that the state’s election officials had 'dumped’ thousand of ballots for the Democrat “when they learned he was losing badly" in the hours after polling stations closed. 

But as Mr McDonald points-out…Wisconsin Republicans prevented election officials from processing mail ballots before election day, so that the president could complain about the results when they were reported, showing large amounts of votes for the Democrat. 

Those votes were not, as Mr Trump’s Twitter post suggested, a “data dump”. 

A video of a Michigan businessman shaming two Republicans who blocked certification of votes in the Detroit area has - rightfully - gone viral.

Ned Staebler was celebrated on social media after he warned two members of the Wayne County Board of canvassers “how history will judge them", for challenging the certification of votes from a predominantly Black area of Detroit. 

The two officials later backtracked, allowing the board to unanimously certify the results from Michigan’s biggest county, before reversing again. 

It was the latest attempt from allies of president Donald Trump to block or delay the certification of results in closely fought states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona. 

Graeme Massie has the report: 

Two Republican members of Wayne County’s board of canvassers now want to “rescind” their votes certifying the results of the presidential election, saying they were pressured into doing so. 

In a development welcomed by Donald Trump and his allies, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann complained that they felt pressured, after they made headlines for initially refusing to accept the results in Michigan’s most populous, and diverse, county. 

One critic warned the pair that the “stain of racism” would follow their decision to challenge results in a county where the population is 80 per cent Black American, amid no proof of foul play in the election process. 

Stuti Mishra has the latest: 

She is the woman most under pressure to defy president Donald Trump and authorise the transition process for Joe Biden, but Emily Murphy, who heads the General Services Administration (GSA), has almost remained silent on the issue.

Tweeting for the first time in almost two weeks on Wednesday, the Trump-appointed GSA head was reported to have sent a short - and bizarre - post to Twitter, which said essentially nothing, and was soon deleted.

Despite growing pressure, Ms Murphy has so far refused to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect - which her agency must do, for his team to begin the full transition process.

Donald Trump would be wiser to acknowledge losing the US presidential election and quit, Czech President Milos Zeman, an early supporter, said on Thursday.

Mr Zeman, one of the few European politicians who backed Mr Trump before his 2016 election victory but steered clear of making such an endorsement this year, said to a Czech news site that Mr Trump should concede the race.

"I personally believe that it would be much more reasonable to give up, not to be embarrassing, and allow the new president to take office," he said.

The US president has so far refused to accept the victory of Democrat challenger Joe Biden, saying the 3 November election was rigged.

Reuters